I agree with you! I responded to your post because the notion of a sex strike, particularly in regard to reproductive rights, tends to be framed as “We won’t have sex with you so long as there’s a chance we can get pregnant and then not get an abortion.” And that’s a totally reasonable position to take.

I’m all for a good old war of the sexes, but something that often gets lost in these conversations (which focus on abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancy) is that many women who have abortions actually do want to have a child, but some end up with a nonviable pregnancy that needed to be terminated.

Oh, Senate, no. It’s one of my favorite spots to eat in Cincy (the Croque Madame is one of the best hot dogs I’ve ever had), but this is just...no. Also, the Bruce Jenner dog doesn’t even sound that good—it seems like they came up with the genitals joke first and then threw together a hot dog special to match.

Exactly. There’s a big difference between shaming individuals for their personal choices (not cool, and usually not very feminist) and being critical of marketing or social norms that privilege one set of choices over another.

An alternative reading of your experience would be that the women you’ve really connected with have been those for whom gender is of primary importance (and that’s probably a high proportion of all women). Women for whom race or religion or sexuality has been more determinative may have moved in and out of your life…

She’ll always be Luce from Imagine Me and You, to me (playing the love interest to Piper Perabo).

Your claim that the world sees people as either babymaking machines or non-babymaking machines—i.e., women or not-women—is certainly one perspective. But you could say the same about race (and many people have): racist ideologies cause the world to see you as either a person or a non-person. You only get to have a…

Not trying to bombard you here, I’ve just been thinking a lot about what you’ve written. I think the generational difference we often see when talking about these things is a second wave vs. third wave perspective. By second-wave perspective, I mean the view—which seems to appear in your comments—that community and…

There’s a generational thing going on here, but I don’t think it’s primarily or only about the question of whether gender is an individual, self-generated identity or the result of socialization. I’m a sociologist, and as a sociologist I tend to put a lot of stock in the notion that people’s identities are heavily…

You want to claim that gender is, universally, the most significant influence on women’s lives and life chances. But doing that means dismissing the experiences of women who’ve said otherwise.

For you, gender feels like a stronger determinant of your life experiences than your ethnicity, your religion, your parental status, etc. I believe you, and I don’t want to invalidate your experience.

I do understand what you’re saying here. Most of my friends and mentors are women, and their life experiences and how they’re viewed by others have shaped their politics and their personalities into the types of people I want to associate with. Of course gender matters.

Michfest—and the more essentialist-leaning second-wave feminism it’s based on—isn’t wrong for saying that gender matters. As you say, the way society treats female-bodied people, gender-non-normative people, etc. has material, sometimes life-and-death consequences. The mistake that these views make is in assuming that …

I feel kind of bittersweet about this. Not because I’ve ever been to Michfest, and not because I support their trans-exclusionary policies (which are terrible), but because I had always hoped it might evolve into something more inclusive.

British chess grandmaster Nigel Short told a chess magazine recently that men are just better at chess than women, because of their brains, because of evolution, because women have higher “emotional intelligence” while men zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. What? Sorry, no, I wasn’t sleeping, this is all so…

Your sarcasm notwithstanding, I do think it’s great for students (or anyone else, for that matter) to try to get a taste of what people different from themselves experience - whether by wearing a headscarf, or by adopting the style markers of other marginalized groups. The point isn’t to adopt that group’s identity or…

“We’re not racist - we elected a black president!”

But they have some sort of metallic paint thing going on? And so you can’t microwave them? This doesn’t seem like the best idea for a mug.

When Muslim students are asking their non-Muslim (or, at least, their non-headscarf-wearing) classmates to wear a headscarf for a day to understand how they get treated, I’d hardly call that cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation would be if all the kids at school decided that headscarves were cool, but didn’t…

The intention of separation of church and state is that public facilities, laws, and institutions should not infringe upon people’s right to practice their religion, nor should they privilege one religion over others. What you’re suggesting by saying “religious activities...don’t belong in schools” is slightly…